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KantIsDead writes "MIT's Technology Review adds to the ongoing discussion of China's monopoly on rare earth metals, an issue that was temporarily catapulted to national attention during China's rare earth embargo of Japan. The current article focuses on the search for alternatives to rare earth metals that would undercut China's monopoly and allow nations to develop their industry without fearing the hand of a Chinese embargo. From the article: 'In the US, the Chinese dominance of rare-earth mineral production has prompted a surge of funding focused on developing permanent magnets that use less, if any, rare-earth materials, such as nearly $7 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E). In one of these projects, University of Nebraska researchers are working to enhance permanent magnets made with an alloy iron and cobalt, or FeCo. This class of materials is sold today, but delivers half or less of the power of the best rare-earth-based magnets. The Nebraska researchers will focus on ways to dope the structural matrix of these alloys with traces of other elements, thereby rearranging their molecular geometry to create stronger, more durable permanent magnetic materials.'"

I suspect there will be folks who open up new markets for rare earths. I believe there are a number of resources that are yet undeveloped on the African continent. Likely the replacement for Conflict Diamonds...Conflict Earths. (Sounds sorta like a scifi novel title, huh?)

It's not because the the Europeans don't have interest, it's because China has strategic and political interests in making the entire continent of Africa politically-aligned with and dependent upon China. It wants to displace the US as the world hegemony, and Africa is currently a place where a foreign aid/investing cold war, of sorts, is occurring between the US and China. China is frequently beating out Western developers, however by offering huge sums of state-backed money in exchange for exclusive miner

Is an asteroid "elsewhere" enough for you? Most metallic asteroids probably have more metals than we have access to in the Earth's crust. We have ways of cutting up large metal objects, but I don't know if there are industrial processes for separating random mixtures of metallic elements. An asteroid which had melted and partially separated the metals would be an interesting challenge.

Sure, but getting to and from is a bitch. And moving them into Earth orbit is the sort of thing you only screw up once. I'm all for mining the belt, but we need substantially better tech for both ground to orbit and in-system flight. Mind you, in the long run setting up such infrastructure is worthwhile for non-commercial reasons, so we really ought to be investing more in it on general principles.

Can never ever happen, I can't even get on a plane to fly to the next state over without an anal probe do you really think they are going to let terrorist fly to an asteroid? What if Al-Qaeda(tm) smashes it into east Texas? { discuss }

Some of the projected estimates of how much could be mined from one suitable asteroid are staggering though. Yes, it would be a monstrous project to accomplish, perhaps it would take us twenty years to pull off. But put it in context - a small, metallic asteroid was estimated to yield around $20 trillion dollars worth of iron and precious metals and that's at 1997 prices. Some of the larger asteroids could effectively supply our metal needs on this planet (iron, rare earths, whatever) for any forseeable tim

What aboot Canada, eh? Canada is freakin' huge, and there were a metric fuckton of diamonds discovered in the middle of frozen nowhere north of Yellow Knife. There have to be a lot of minerals undiscovered in all that frozen wasteland.

Really? There are rare earth metals/materials recycling plants online right now today? Ones that don't exist only in china because of pollution controls and regulations make it generally otherwise unprofitable?

It's pretty much the same concept. If China embargoes the world for whatever reason, recycling isn't going to save us. Especially when exponential growth in demand means that we can't meet the needs of the new with the crap that is old and recycled. I mean seriously, how many people had an Ipod or the

Don't think "right now today", think five years from now. If you only think today, you'll always be in crisis management.

The number of ipods 10 years ago? What does that matter? If you want to look at ipods, look at how many people have owned in the past 10 years. Most people are on their 3rd ipod at this point, with two previous ones in the trash. Think about the amount of electronics we've thrown away in the past 30 years.

By the way, what makes recycling successful is not that demand outweighs s

If we did, china would let it go on for a year or two, then wait till all the investors dump huge loads of cash into the business to expand and streamline. After fortunes are invested, China will stop any existing embargos and then triple their rare earth mining output just to slam all the competitors into the ground. If they do it right, they'd probably traumatize their competitors so terribly that no one would think of mining rare earth minerals for another 30 years.

Gold miners know the price of gold fluctuates and open/close thier mines accordingly, oil companies open/close their wells in response to OPEC, why would rare earth miners be "traumatised" doing the same thing? Sure there is a time lag between price movements and mine output but that lag also applies to China's mines.

Bullshit. There's a pair of big rare earth mines in California that will be up and running by the middle of next year. One of them (Mountain Pass) used to provide the vast majority of the world's rare earths before China came on the scene and priced them out of the market.

Re-starting mining is only 1-2 years of work. Starting a new mine may be 3-4 years depending on how big of an operation. CA is Re-opening Mountain Pass Mine, which was the largest mine at one time (and remains high in ore). In addition, it appears that mines in the west are going to be started. In particular, over in North West Colorado, by Rifle, Colorado.

The item that takes time AND MONEY, is the PROCESSING of the ores. That is what the feds should have backed Congressman's bill to spend upwards of 1 bi

Having ore is NOT a problem. What is missing is the processing of the ore. That is what will not happen. And at this time, we have to send the ore to China to be processed. That is a BIG issue.
That is also why we need to start a fast program to process it.

While we will find alternatives for the magnets (in fact, probably better ones), I doubt that we will find alternatives for many of the uses. In particular, it is used in doping to improve conduction for many of the newer electronics. Basically, we need

China DOES have the largest amount of currently cheaply available REE. BUT, they are not the only ones. However, they have ran around for the last 15 years trying to buy up mines, or put them out of business by ignoring the environmental issues, subsidizing the prices, and then dumping on the market. Right now, they have the vast majority of working mines.

China has the ONLY processing of REE. America had it with Magnaquench, but a bunch of neo-cons served as a front for C

Sure.
I also know that China manipulates their money and IMF says that it wrong, but does little to nothing. Likewise, IMF says that heavy subsidization is wrong, yet China subsidizes energy, mining, manufacturing, etc. Again IMF says to not dump, yet, China is the worst for it.
The fact is, that China FLAUNTS their many treaties and legal obligations. W ignored it to America's downfall. Obama is at BEST, so-so with his handling of this (personally, I think that the current stuff has more to do with electio

It requires a LOT of money to fire it up. About 1 billion. That is money that my Congressman has a bill in CONgress to do a grant to start this. Sadly, the man does not have much spine and simply allowed it to fall to the byside. Personally, I would like to see CONgress quit giving money away and instead, lend it at 0% interest. And in this case, allow multiple companies to bid for this and perhaps lend to 2 companies. The fact is, that the world NEEDS REE, and there is no real good alternatives, save in M

I only wonder what lays yet undiscovered in the Antarctic, there is no telling what sort of things can be found there. Though I think treaty prevents any sort of commercial ventures.Though that's just so the Military can establish their secret base there.

Apart from the fact that treaties pretty much bar any wide-scale development or extraction, simply put, it's damned cold down there, and even the limited amount of activity down there costs an exorbitant amount of money. Rare earth minerals would have to get really damned expensive before anyone would seriously consider it.

Both are cold, but large portions of the Antarctic continent get considerably colder. Now maybe there's a summer time window there, but even barring that, probably just as bad, if not worse, is the fact that unlike Sweden or the Northwest Territories or Alaska, or even Siberia and all those other hostile northern hemisphere places, they are all on the same land mass as large-scale transportation infrastructure. Antarctica lies in the middle of an ocean, the nearest major

I think it's a safe bet that if Antarctica had it in sufficient quantity such that it would be economically feasible to obtain it, many countries would not really give a rats ass about the treaty and it would only be fear of repercussions that would stop them from carrying out any operations there that would violate it. The problem is that some nations are powerful enough that such fear would probably not be of concern to them... so I'm really rather leaning towards hoping that Antarctica doesn't have very

Treaties are only valuable as long as the cost of violating them is greater than the cost of abiding by them. In other words, if large deposits of rich mineral deposits were discovered in Antarctica, it would be far more profitable to forget about the treaties and one could then expect a land rush as nations colonize it and began cutting up the landscape.

I only wonder what lays yet undiscovered in the Antarctic, there is no telling what sort of things can be found there.

Geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalayas. They found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to sci

Well they tried mining in Australia but got attacked by Flying Polyps [wikipedia.org] and the contractors from China just keep mumbling something about the Plateau of Leng. So really, it's a no-win situation.
(And yeah, AtMoM was the first thing I thought of at that line as well. Here's hoping now that he's free of the Hobbit Del Torro returns to making the first ever big-budget Lovecraft adaptation)

"While U.S. deposits also exist in several states such as Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, they are still being explored and could take as many as 15 years before becoming fully operational, according the GAO report."

"While U.S. deposits also exist in several states such as Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, they are still being explored and could take as many as 15 years before becoming fully operational, according the GAO report."

It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place. The same can be said for other industries.

It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place. The same can be said for other industries.

On the bright side, its bringing jobs - not just McJobs either - back home. The rise of China - especially if they ever let the yuan float - may turn out to be the best thing to happen to the US in decades.

Part of the problem is that rare earth's have been so cheap they are being used some places where they are totally not needed.

There are plenty of applications where a switched variable reluctance motor is just as effective and efficient, and those do not require any permanent magnets.

(I've often wondered what nanotech might bring to bear on ferromagnetic materials for transformers and motors, to reduce hysteresis loss and increase saturation points. Doesn't seem to be an area that gets as much glory as dev

An electrical powerplant for plane. More economical to have APU supply power for things like lights & AC than to need to spin up engines when sitting on tarmac. The grandparent post is indicating the wheels (ground propulsion) will be driven by an electric motor powered by the APU.

On ICE I don't have clue. ICE is usually internal combustion engine but that doesn't make sense here. Propulsion on a conventional pasenger liner is from the jet engines which are obviously turb

. . . the jet engines which are obviously turbines not internal combustion.

Though I have never heard of them referred to as internal combustion engines before, jet engines obviously do not have combustion external to the engine.The fuel burns inside the jet engine and is part of the working fluid, i.e. it is internal combustion.

1)Impose a polution tax on dirty industry. That allow the local rare earth metal mining company to start again with the incured cost of respecting polution law, while still staying competitive
2) repel polution law and allow local company to polute as much as the chinese. Human resource might still make them more expensive than the chinese though.
3) make up a miracle new technology. Good luck on that one.

Your miracle new technology is ready. (You're welcome, and thanks for the luck.)

It's called the AC induction motor, and it uses no permanent magnets--only copper and/or iron and/or aluminum. A fine example was in GM's EV-1 in the 1990s, and its descendants live on at AC Propulsion, and, consequently, Tesla Motors. Permanent magnet motors are likely to retain slightly higher efficiency, but the difference in cost of the construction materials will allow the market to take care of the rare earth "problem".

Then they will stop importing wheat, pork, chicken feet, semiconductors, airplanes, and nuclear reactors from the US and Japan and really roll up their sleeves to do researches rather than dumping R&D money in the property market as they are doing now?

If China only exports and doesn't import, they would not have got their way so far. Most people don't seem to realize that almost everything they export have the "Made" in China labels outside whereas a lot of our exports do not even have labels, such as

For "us", it could be bad if you are growing wheat, corn, chickens and pigs; or if you are an engineer. That's why our government can do much but maintain a status quote. And that may also be one reason they keep buying aircraft and microprocessors instead of really making efforts to make those. They certainly understand the political need to ensure we are not really united against them, just like the US wanted to make sure China and Soviet were not united back in the 1970's when we kicked Taiwan out of UN.

I like many other people in this country happen to like the cheaply priced crap that comes from China. I can buy things that I otherwise would be unable to afford. The quality is crap but it fits it's purpose quite nicely.

And this coming from here in Australia a place where our economy and unemployment rate is much better than that of America. If you would seriously consider dropping China, now is not the correct time to do it.

Good luck to you when the prices of your HDTV, your notebook PC, your iPad and your mobile phone all double, not to mention a hundred other hi-tech gadgets that you depend upon. The days when China only made cheap plastic crap are long past. Check all the high-tech goods that you own for Made in China labels. A huge proportion of all semiconductor manufacturing is in China, along with all the supply chain industries that enable it. And you are not going to just shift that to Africa or even India overnight,

1. We'll never find labour in our own countries as cheap as in China. Slavery (which Chinese labour conditions are very, very close to) is illegal here. We have all those pesky human rights obligations.2. Being able to outsource our pollution is a major convenience.

We're seeing the consequences of some old decisions by the Chinese government. So I have a request. Are there any modern Kremlinologists (the name for people who tried to divine the intent and inner workings of the former USSR) who have insight into the current resource strategy of the Chinese government and its origins? Making the deliberate decision to corner the rare earths market is a strategic one that would have required a great deal of effort and discipline, both of advocacy before the ultimate decis

"Are there any modern Kremlinologists (the name for people who tried to divine the intent and inner workings of the former USSR) who have insight into the current resource strategy of the Chinese government and its origins?"

I'm no CIA expert but the strategy seems to be this

1) CCP win.2) You lose.3) Profit.

Hokey religions and ancient political ideologies are no match for a mercantalist blaster at your side, kid.

Rare earths really should be called cheap ass low value earths. There isn't a lot of profit in it. The US, australia, and few other places mined them because they are needed but they are hardly masively profitable. China got into the biz because it is a cheap biz to get into and doesn't require a lot of skill (like say building jet planes or microprocessors).

As a result of china dirt cheap labor, utter lack of safety or enviromental stan

No offense, but yes, they did. They apparently have been buying rare earth production in other countries.

Your belief that is some "master plan" is misplaced. If we were willing to use slave labor, discard miners when the job killed them without benefits, contimnate ground water with industrial toxins which will be around for couple centuries causing birth defects, and manipulate the dollar downward to destroy any standard of living for our citizens we too could be king of the shit pile. All that for a market which grosses less revenue globally than video games do.

You're operating on the naive principle that the rare earths market will stay its current size. They're also working to grab a big share of the oil market. I hear that's a bit larger than the video game market.

Everyone knows it's just indestructible bedrock and the void beyond, if you go far enough.

No, the real solution is to sneak in, destroy all their torches, and knock a couple holes in their walls somewhere they won't notice, so they get overrun with creepers. Bonus if we can find a way to cut off their supply of flint so they don't have enough arrows to defend themselves.

Although well over 90 percent of the minerals are produced in China, they are found in many places around the world, and, in spite of their name, are actually abundant in the earth's crust (the name is a hold-over from a 19th-century convention). In recent years, low-cost Chinese production and environmental concerns have caused suppliers outside of China to shut down operations.

In other words, we (the West) have artifically created this situation by shutting down our own mines with labor and evironmental regulations, while allowing China (with no real enforcement of labor or environmental regulations, even if they are on the books) to dominate the market. I saw a TV spot about this a while back and apparently there was an operating mine in California as recently as 10 years ago, which simply wasn't able to compete with Chinese prices because the California mine had the expense of actually complying with the US environmental regulations. That gives the Chinese an artificial price advantage.

The market for these goods are mostly export markets in Japan, North America, and Europe, so this is in our power to control. To stimulate production in the west, we could do one of two things : 1) eliminate our own self-imposed regulations (perhaps unacceptabe from an environmental point of view) or 2) eliminate the artifical price advantage that the chinese have from not having regulations. I would choose # 2. We need only tax chinese imports and goods with chinese components. For example, say a motor from Japan uses magnets and is being exported to the USA, then the manufacturer would need to demonstrate that the magnet was made from non-chinese metals to be exempt from an import tariff. Once the artifical price advantage of the chinese component is nullfied, the manufacturer would be willing to pay higher prices from other non-chinese mines. Then other mines outside China would arise in the market. As an added side-effect, the Chinese might even begin regulating their own industry to get out from under the tariff.

Although well over 90 percent of the minerals are produced in China, they are found in many places around the world, and, in spite of their name, are actually abundant in the earth's crust (the name is a hold-over from a 19th-century convention). In recent years, low-cost Chinese production and environmental concerns have caused suppliers outside of China to shut down operations.

I believe that should be: "In a modern realistic theory of markets, definitely not. In practice, also definitely not...

Although many economics discussion on-line seem to be informed only by a haphazard reading of Adam Smith, much progress has been made in recent decades in developing economic theories that actually resemble real world behavior with its costs and quite noticeable failures. The perfection of free markets is ideology (or worse, campaign rhetoric), not economics.

I know that this is rat-holing the thread a bit, but can you expand on this? I hear it a lot, but it usually assumes a (IMO) really bad definition of "failures" which means "thing I want is more expensive than I want to pay" or "price changed more quickly than that for which I was prepared."
Both of these might be undesirable to you and I, but are in no way "failures" in any sense of the word. They just reflect the previous state of imperfect knowledge and the (often irrational) reaction to the progressive

Yes, yes, yes - and which congressmember do you think would step forward to introduce such legislation? Keeping in mind that they're only sent there on the financial graces of their corporate lobbyists (which are just as well invested in China's terrible practices)?

In other words, we (the West) have artifically created this situation by shutting down our own mines with labor and evironmental regulations, while allowing China (with no real enforcement of labor or environmental regulations, even if they are on the books) to dominate the market.

Uh, you're close, but you left out the part where we didn't ALLOW China to dominate the market, we CAUSED China to dominate the market by BUYING THEIR GOODS. We know they are slavers and polluters but we keep buying. A responsible government would cut off all trade with a government which permitted such wanton use of the Earth's resources.

In 1920 the operators at AT&T striked. This led AT&T to pick up the pace and change it's entire network over to switches and the rotary phone. AT&T had resisted this prior to it realizing how vulnerable it was to a strike.

It would be just history repeating itself if this action by China led us to a way to replace Rare Earths entirely rendering them obsolete. But that still depends on us being able to duplicate the effects.

Rare earth metals aren't really that rare despite their name. China is good at mining them cheaply, which caused most everyone else shut down production. Some countries (U.S.A) are looking at reopening mines. By playing these games China may be shooting themselves in the foot. Time will tell.

There were many mines in North America. They were shut down because to comply with US/Canadian environmental regulation and pay the wages here would put them in a huge competitive disadvantage versus the Chinese mines. You just can't compete with places where they put environment and worker protection at such low places in their priorities.

You just can't compete with places where they put environment and worker protection at such low places in their priorities.

And we essentially circumvent our own priorities by accepting theirs; we ourselves are placing those priorities at the same low that they do by investing in their goods. If we really did stand behind placing such a high priority on these protections, then we'd enforce it by actually investing in and supporting it ourselves, rather than relying on those that don't to do it for us.

The principle doesn't change based on who's committing the action - if we can accept that others are showing such disregard for en

as others have noted, there are enough rare earths, they aren't that rare. it's just that china, wihtout any work force laws or legal protections for its workers it is allowed to treat like slaves of the state, is able to parlay that into cheaper prices. so mining elsewhere withers and atrophies

if push came to shove, we can start new mines rather quickly

what worries me is manufacturing know how and infrastructure. it takes a generation to have a good manufacturing base, at least. and i'm not talking machines, i'm talking people. the manufacturing base is dying in the west, as everything moves to china

this is where china can really squeeze us, and we won't be able to react fast enough, because in a decade or two, we won't know how to make anything, it will all be made in china

we need to keep our manufacturing base, the whole spectrum of technologies and know how and expertise, humming along here

a rare earth is a rare earth, whether dug up in california or inner mongolia

but that 70 year old guy who knows how all about phase transitions in the manufacture of specialty glasses, or that 80 year old guy who knows all about resistance settings on collodial separation equipment, or whatever: when they go, its gone, the only other brain with that info is in shanghai

it's like us in the west watching iran trying to build a nuclear bomb and stumbling in its lack of knowhow. in 20-30 years, in a conflict, china could be in the same position, just watching us try to manufacture all sorts of high specialized industrial applications and us over here going "how do you do this?" "i dunno, the guy who knew that died 20 years ago" "well where's his knowledge backup?" "well, the bank of china bought that portfolio 10 years ago and moved it all to guangzhou, no one at the time thought it was a big deal"

The attempted solution to that is documenting an ISO process for everything in manufacturing. From what I have seen, this only looks good on paper. Trying to start a new production line by the book without experience may take longer than learning from scratch.

This is purely speculation, so take it with a grain of salt: No raw materials and manufacturing work from China due to embargoes and general asshattery --> Huge demand for mats and mfg --> No workforce willing/able/allowed to do the work --> the perpetually "almost there" robotics industry lurches forward to fill the void. The warehousing [kivasystems.com] industry [rmtrobotics.com] has already been transformed by robots, and theres plenty of talk [google.com] about robotic mining already. I can't help but think that all this is quite a good thin

It is no secret that rare earth is NOT rare at all, and China just have about 30-40% of the world's rare earth.

The only "monopoly" China has is selling them cheaply. The purported reason by Chinese officials is because the rare earth industry is heavily fragmented, and econ 101, with many identical sellers, big buyers from US and Japan can set the price so low that only razor thin margin remains. You are free to make up you own conspirac

Now, after getting a pittance for all the rare earth sold for the past few decades, China finally wakes up and realize that having a rare earth reserve is actually IMPORTANT in the long term. And surprise(!), they don't to continue to sell on the cheap. So they are now trying to consolidate the rare earth mining industry (which takes time), and in the meanwhile, use administrative means to limit the export (i.e. limit their losses).

I'm sure that your use of the world "finally" is unintentional. China, on the other hand, rarely does anything unintentionally:

Entering the 21st century, the pace of industrial and economic globalization is speeding up. As China enters the WTO, the Chinese government has begun the implementation of its policy to develop its western regions. Located in western China, Baotou is famous for its rich rare earth resources, thus being named "The Mother Lode of Rare Earth". In 1992, Chinese President Deng Xiaoping pointed out, "There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China...."

Given the fact that the OPEC model of monopolistic control of resources was firmly established by 1992, I do not believe that Xiaoping - and China - had any intention other than gaining a monopoly, or they would have compared rare earths to dà biàn rather than oil.

There is plenty of rare earth all around the world. So if you don't want to buy from China (or China won't sell to you), just mine it yourself.

Instead of printing money to give to bankers, why don't the US government just setup and run mines to extract rare earth from US itself? It create real jobs and solve this problem in one go.

But actually doing something to solve a problem? Nah... it is easier just to find someone to blame while still giving out pork to corporate supporters. It keeps the problem alive so more people can be blamed, and keep the pork money flowing too!

Those Chilean miners are damn lucky they weren't in China (or some part of Africa for that matter), if they were it would have been a write-off case kept away from the press and officials would have said "nothing to see folks, move along" despite protests from friends and family.

I think that says a lot about a country, when what most people would consider a third world nation does a better job of looking out for its people.

What about the concentration of the platinum group metals... 80% or so are found in South Africa

Is that figure relative to reserves, production or export? Yes, south Africa has a large proportion of the worlds PGE by all of the above measures, but it's by no means a monopoly. The reserves and production of the Russian Federation are also major, though export is less (as they use a lot themselves), then there are non-trivial reserves in Canada (Sudbury complex)...